Tag Archives: Postmodernism

Poststructuralism is one of the most important social theories to have emerged from Europe in the late Twentieth Century, yet it remains notoriously difficult to define. In this concise introductory text, Robert John Parkes provides: (1) an original and accessible guide to the three orientations that underpin poststructural thought; (2) a brief genealogy of poststructuralism including an exploration of its relationship to the philosophy of structuralism; and (3) a succinct response to the main criticisms of poststructural theory. Deliberately short and to the point, this will be a welcome text for busy university students and scholars wanting to gain a rapid understanding of poststructural thought.

Parkes, R. J. (2009). Discipline and the dojo. Paper presented in the ‘Complicating understandings of discipline’ symposium at the annual conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE), Canberra (ACT),
November 29 – December 3.

“You must be very disciplined?” is a question I’ve been asked many times, almost the instant after I’ve revealed my twenty years of involvement in the martial arts. It rehearses a popular perception of the martial arts, and is frequently the motivation of many a parent who has brought their child to a dojo in order to “become more disciplined”. This paper is concerned with the productive nature of discipline. That is, with what discipline produces. I use the martial arts as a case study to explore theoretically and empirically Foucault’s (1977; 1982/1994) claim regarding the productive nature of power and discipline, particularly because it so frequently is depicted as a site of ‘serious’ discipline. Informed by the later Foucault, I explore both the constraining and enabling effects of discipline as it manifests in and through the martial arts; and consequently I investigate the way discipline is central to the act of becoming in the dojo. This is not performed in some celebration of martial arts. Rather, I am interested in using the martial arts as a case study to understand the complex ways in which discipline, desire, and power circulate and interact to produce particular kinds of subjects. That is to say, I will argue that there is not one set of ‘disciplinary’ practices (Foucault, 1977) that is constraining, and another set that is enabling. Instead, I hope to make the case that all disciplinary constraints are precisely enabling forces that operate on and through the individual martial artist as a means of self-formation; and that participation in a disciplinary regime or process results in the ‘production’ of a particular kind of person, individual, or martial artist.

The above conference paper was an abridged version of the argument published in the edited collection below:

Since the emergence of postmodern social theory, history has been haunted by predictions of its imminent end. Postmodernism has been accused of making historical research and writing untenable, encouraging the proliferation of revisionist histories, providing fertile ground for historical denial, and promoting the adoption of a mournful view of the past. This provocative book re-examines the nature of the alleged ‘threat’ to history posed by postmodernism, and explores the implications of postmodern social theory for history as curriculum. Interrupting History will be of interest to curricularists and critical pedagogues around the globe, and to history educators at all levels of education. Making an important contribution to the struggle for critical and effective histories, it is a must-read text for those studying or teaching history today.

Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education Series (No. 404)
General Editor: Shirley Steinberg

Since the emergence of postmodern social theory, history has been haunted by predictions of its imminent end. Announcing a crisis of representation, the postmodern condition has placed in doubt the historical narrative’s claims to truth (Jenkins, 1991). Postmodernism has been accused of making historical research and writing untenable, encouraging the proliferation of revisionist histories, fostering uncritical relativism, providing fertile ground for historical denial, and promoting the adoption of a mournful view of the past (Evans, 1997; Windshuttle, 1996) . Tethered to state political interests, historical narratives are frequently studied and taught in national categories (Curthoys, 2003); and history as a school subject is regularly an area of public debate, government disquiet, and a site of struggle over collective memory and cultural literacy (Macintyre, & Clark, 2003; Nash, Crabtree, & Dunn, 1998; Richardson, 2002; Taylor & Guyver, 2011). The emergence and recognition of counter-memories from Indigenous minorities, and the de-centering of the nation inside global histories, have interrupted the incontestability of the nation-building project. One area of my work in History curriculum sits at the intersection of these concerns. I am interested in the various ‘ends of History’ these concerns signal, and have worked to re-evaluate the apparent ‘threat’ to history posed by postmodernism, and the implications of postmodern and postcolonial theory for History education. I am increasingly interested in History education and the problem of the nation, and how this sits in tension with forces of internationalisation. Many of these themes are taken up in my recent book Interrupting History: Rethinking History Curriculum after ‘the End of History’; and I am currently co-guest editing with Professor Monika Vinterek (Darlana University, Sweden), History Curriculum, Geschichtsdidaktik, and the Problem of the Nation, a special issue of the journal ‘Education Sciences’ which will also attempt to explore how these issues are being addressed in various regional traditions of History education.

For the student of today, school is only one of the places from which they will develop their understanding and relationship to the past. In our post-literate age, when most of us can read, but many of us don’t want to, we would prefer to watch a film or surf the net rather than read a book (Rosenstone, 2001). Through the medium of the nightly news; in the press; as television docudramas, Hollywood films, or cable TV documentaries; in novels; through museum exhibits; commemoration ceremonies; monuments to the fallen; and increasingly on the internet, through websites, vodcasts and podcasts, we cannot avoid the encounter with history as media text (Davies, 2006). of course, historical representations arising within and across various media have varying degrees of reliability as historical accounts, presenting complex “mixtures of fact, fiction, fabrication and faking” (Ellsworth, 1991); and may be the artefact of rigorous scholarship executed within recognisable traditions of historiography, but are just as likely to be the products of a commercial imagination with little respect for disciplinary rigor or forms. This problem is compounded in contemporary postmodern culture, where the line between fact and fiction in historical work has been questioned (Curthoys & Docker, 2006; Jenkins, 2003; White, 1999) and is often deliberately blurred in reality television, mocumentaries, historical novels, and other popular media forms; where, even in television news, as Jean Baudrillard (1995) has argued, reality and representation implode, leaving us with only an endless array of simulations which often supplant any reality they were once intended to depict. It is within this cultural context, that the positive public reception of The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown (2003), a fictional novel which claims to be drawing on a ‘hidden history’ of Christianity, but which clearly gets the history confused (Ehrman, 2004), comes to represent the very problem being articulated. These cultural developments present a challenge, not only to public understandings of history and its discipline, but also to History and Social Science education in our schools (Vinson, 2006). Working at the intersection of History Education and Media Studies, I am increasingly interested in how we teach History in this post-literate, new media age. I am currently writing up the results of a collaborative study, funded by the University of Newcastle, that explored the use of visual media across the teaching of the Humanities and Social Sciences.